Or why I sometimes miss pencils with rubbers on the end

There was a time when writing meant one thing: grabbing a pencil, licking the end of it for luck (everyone did it, nobody admits it), and getting on with it. Your entire creative arsenal consisted of:

1. A blunt pencil.
2. A shared metal pencil sharpener the teacher guarded like the Crown Jewels.
3. A rubber squeezed into a metal ring stuck at the end of said pencil to erase your spelling disasters.

That was it. No menus. No updates. No blue screens of doom.

If something went wrong, the fix was charmingly simple: rub it out and try again.

Fast-forward to the present day, and I am armed with an entire battalion of digital writing tools, each one proudly designed by someone who has clearly never written a book. Or possibly has never even seen one.

Every platform, every app, every shiny interface seems to believe it is indispensable to the creative process. And yet, the moment you introduce one piece of badly written software to another piece of badly written software, they behave like two stags meeting in the forest. They lock horns. They refuse to move. They make a strange noise. And then they fall over, dragging my entire day down with them.

I click one button and the whole enterprise simply collapses.

Once upon a time, about a decade ago, creating an ePub file to publish my novels was a simple matter. Admittedly the resulting eBook wasn't elegant, but it was functional, it worked, and better still, the reader could read what I had written. Ten years on and the process has evolved into using several apps (software to you and me of a certain age) to create the ePub file and, sometimes, the process comes to a grinding halt.

 Export. Error.

 Import. Error.

 Compile. Catastrophic error.

 Try again. Something has mysteriously vanished.

 Try again. Something has mysteriously duplicated itself.

 Try again. A quote mark has exploded into seventeen symbols and a medieval rune.

Meanwhile, the software insists nothing is wrong and that I must be the problem.

Of course, after thirty minutes of screaming silently into the void and muttering words once banned on the BBC, I eventually do what every modern writer does.

I find another way around it.

 A workaround.

 A hack.

 A sideways approach.

 A cunning plan involving three apps, two file conversions, and a sacrificial chicken for my evening meal.

I’ll be honest, sometimes I simply give up.

I reach for the digital equivalent of my childhood comfort blanket.

A pencil.

 With a rubber stuck on the end.

Because when technology fails spectacularly, and it will, usually on a deadline, usually when I’ve had very little sleep, a pencil has one glorious advantage.

It does exactly what you ask of it.

 No errors.

 No updates.

 No corrupted files.

 No arguing with other pencils.

 Just quiet, obedient usefulness.

Sometimes, in a world full of software tripping over its own shoelaces, it’s nice to go back to basics.

Even if my handwriting now looks like I've had two pints of lager and a packet of crisps for lunch.

Copyright © Tom Kane November 2025

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